Carnac's Folly

"I don't think he'll tell me," came Fabian's voice. "Why should he?"

A moment afterwards the two men met.

"Well, what's the trouble, Carnac?" asked Fabian in a somewhat challenging voice.

"I'm going away."

"Oh--for how long?" Fabian asked quizzically. "I don't know--a year, perhaps. I want to make myself a better artist, and also free myself."

Now his eyes were on Junia in her summer-time recreation, and her voice, humming a light-opera air, was floating to him through the autumn morning.

"Has something got you in its grip, then?"

"I'm the victim of a reckless past, like you." Something provocative was in his voice and in his words.

"Was my past reckless?" asked Fabian with sullen eyes.

"Never so reckless as mine. You fought, quarrelled, hit, sold and bought again, and now you're out against your father, fighting him."

"I had to come out or be crushed."

"I'm not so sure you won't be crushed now you're out. He plays boldly, and he knows his game. One or the other of you must prevail, and I think it won't be you, Fabian. John Grier does as much thinking in an hour as most of us do in a month, and with Tarboe he'll beat you dead. Tarboe is young; he's got the vitality of a rhinoceros. He knows the business from the bark on the tree. He's a flyer, is Tarboe, and you might have been in Tarboe's place and succeeded to the business."

Fabian threw out his arms. "But no! Father might live another ten years--though I don't think so--and I couldn't have stood it. He was lapping me in the mud."

"He doesn't lap Tarboe in the mud."

"No, and he wouldn't have lapped you in the mud, because you've got imagination, and you think wide and long when you want to. But I'm middle-class in business. I've got no genius for the game. He didn't see my steady qualities were what was needed. He wanted me to be like himself, an eagle, and I was only a robin red-breast."

Suddenly his eyes flashed and his teeth set. "You couldn't stand him, wouldn't put up with his tyranny. You wanted to live your own life, and you're doing it. When he bought me out, what was there for me to do but go into the only business I knew, with the only big man in the business, besides John Grier. I've as good blood as he's got in his veins. I do business straight.